AI vs. Drake: Stolen Voice or New Music Genre?
This past week, a song by the name of “Heart on My Sleeve” by “ghostwriter” went viral. It featured the AI-generated voices of artists Drake and The Weeknd, and was taken down a few days after it blew up in fame.
AI softwares are now capable of mimicking a celebrity’s voice and superimposing them onto reference vocals. Essentially, you can record yourself singing a song, and layer an artist’s voice, like Drake, over your own, so that it appears as though Drake is singing instead of you.
Universal Music Group — the giant music corporation behind some of our favourite artists, called for streaming platforms to prevent AI companies and artists from accessing the label’s songs — and warned the AI companies that they were violating copyrights en masse by using music in order to train new AI models.
It’s difficult to articulate the copyright issues at play here because the song in question wasn’t something the artists ever wrote or sang, so technically there is no “original work” to go off of.
But before I look at if something is legally wrong, I tend to ask myself whether I feel it is morally wrong, and so I recalled the story of the Little Mermaid…
The Little Mermaid Quandary
Before I consider if something is legally wrong, I tend to ask myself whether it feels morally wrong, and I recalled the story of the Little Mermaid, specifically the part where her voice is stolen by the old Sea Witch. Now, I’m not calling AI-generated artists Sea Witches, but I am suggesting that maybe, if we feel instinctually that co-opting someone else’s voice/likeness without their consent is wrong, then we should follow this instinct when interpreting the law.
So, can the Little Mermaid protect herself by copyrighting her own voice? AI artist Holly Herndon says, “You cannot copyright a voice, but an artist retains exclusive commercial rights to their name and you cannot pass off a song as coming from them without their consent,” and cited the Midler v Ford Motor Co 1998 case, in which Ford hired one of Bette Midler’s backup singers to imitate her delivery of her own song after she refused the job. She sued them for copyright infringement, and won. Many assumed at first that ghostwriter’s song was a leaked Drake x The Weeknd song, so it may be that a court could interpret this as “passing off”.
Food For Thought ….
Should we be looking at AI assisted music as unethical? How different is it really from remixing a song (which we see as a perfectly valid use of fair use/fair dealings).
If people can trademark scents, colour pallets, and sounds, why ca n’t artists trademark their own distinctive voices?
Does this situation touch on the “Right of Publicity”, which is protected under the common law tort of wrongful appropriation of personality (unauthorized commercial exploitation of a person’s name, image, voice or likeness)?
The song….was kind of a great track, and I’ll be sad to see it go. Before it was taken down from streaming platforms, it racked up 600,000 Spotify streams, 15m TikTok views and 275,000 YouTube views. So, what do you think? Stolen voice, or new music genre?
Written by: Shany Raitsin, J.D Candidate 2024 — Lincoln Alexander School of Law
